Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Independent BIM Study: Revit to Ecotec

Over the past few weeks, Kate and I explored the idea of using Revit as a tool to design sustainably. After much research we decided that our objective was to understand the connection of Revit to Ecotect and how to run an analysis at any point in the design process.

We read several case studies about BIM and sustainable design. The first one posted in the blog touches on the possibilities that Revit has on its own. The second features a program called IES VE. And the third talks about how Ecotect can aid in sustainable design. After comparing these articles we decided to focus on the connection between Ecotect and Revit. We found that Ecotect provides many benefits by allowing designers to simulate the performance of their building projects right from the earliest stages of conceptual design and by giving a visual and interactive display of the analysis results to better understand. Revit-based design models can be exported to gbXML format and imported directly into Autodesk Ecotect for analysis throughout the design process. Also, Early-stage, Revit-based massing models can be used with the site analysis functionality to determine the optimal location, shape, and orientation of a building design based on fundamental environmental factors such as the overshadowing of a particular building

Autodesk provides many video tutorials on this connection between Revit and Ecotect. The first one taught us how to load a Revit file into Ecotect by exporting it as a gbXML file. We decided to follow the instructions using our first Revit project, the house. We had difficulties with exporting. The following post explains how we solved these problems. On December 8th’s post we successfully imported a gbXML file into Ecotect from Revit.  Finally, we learned how to run a daylight analysis and tried this with the imported house project. We were successful in understanding the connection between Ecotect and Revit and learning how to run an analysis.

Hannah

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